Proposed mission to Mars will take just 501 days, but doesn’t stop at Mars

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If you haven’t noticed, a human hasn’t made a trip to Mars just yet, even though there always seems to be some kind of news about going there. This time the news concerns how long the trip would take to get to the Red Planet. According to the announcement a trip to Mars and back would take just 501 days, so long as you took the trip in 2018.

Space equipment company Paragon Space Development Corp. and millionaire Dennis Tito, recently made the announcement, saying that the plan is to send a male and female duo on the mission. The duo is preferred to be beyond child-bearing years, as the trip will be long and lonely and it would almost certainly screw up the logistics if a third, newborn human suddenly joined the crew. Also, probably more importantly, there’s a radiation risk that could prevent a younger couple from being able to reproduce after the mission is complete.

Incredibly, the trip would not result in the crew actually landing on Mars. The pair would simply travel to Mars and return home — a much easier goal than landing on the planet and taking off again, as made clear by the Curiosity landing this summer. The point of the trip is to instill inspiration, rather than take the first to step on the planet.

The journey is planned for 2018, not because the team planning the trip requires that specific amount of time to prepare (even though, yeah, they probably need a few years), but because Mars will be closer to Earth that year — 36 million miles away — than it normally is. The cost of the trip would total around one billion dollars, but that seems worth going to Mars. The total cost of the Mars Science Laboratory mission was said to be $2.5 billion, so, while there is no landing, at least the trip is being done on-the-cheap.

Though the crew wouldn’t be gracing Mars with a human’s presence, they are projected to come within just 100 miles of the planet, which would certainly be closer than any human has ever previously managed. For more information about the journey, head on over to the foundation dedicated to making it happen, Inspiration Mars. Even if going to Mars but not actually going there might seem like an incredible tease.